SAPPORO – Following new testimony from a former police inspector about a Russian man who was caught in an illegal police sting operation, a court Tuesday overturned his 1998 conviction for handgun possession.

The Sapporo District Court acquitted former seaman Andrei Novosyolov, 47, who served two years in prison, but did not rule on the legality of the police operation.

Novosyolov was arrested in November 1997 at the port of Otaru in western Hokkaido for possessing a handgun and was found guilty of violating the firearms control law by the district court in August 1998. He had been seeking a retrial, claiming he was the victim of an illegal operation by the Hokkaido police.

Novosyolov’s defense counsel filed for a retrial in September 2013 following new testimony from a former police inspector stating the person who approached Novosyolov about exchanging a used car for a handgun was in fact working for police investigators.

The defense council claimed that Novosyolov was the victim of an “illegal sting operation” by the police and asked the court to make a “bold judgment” on the illegality of the operation in the retrial. Prosecutors had also sought Novosyolov’s acquittal.

The district court approved holding a retrial in March last year, recognizing that the sting operation in Novosyolov’s case was illegal, prompting prosecutors to file an immediate appeal with the Sapporo High Court.

The high court in October rejected the prosecutors’ appeal and called for the retrial to be held on the grounds that police officials at the time made false statements in investigative documents, but it did not rule on the legality of the police operation.

Yoshiaki Inaba, the 63-year-old former police inspector who worked in the Hokkaido police’s firearms control division at the time of his arrest, was arrested in 2002 on suspicion of stimulant drug use, and admitted during his trial that the Hokkaido police had engaged in a sting operation.

“It was a sting operation conducted to aid the police,” Inaba said in a recent interview. “He must have gone through a lot of hardships in prison in a foreign country. I want to apologize to him.”

“His acquittal would lift a great weight from my shoulders,” Inaba added.

At the time of Novosyolov’s arrest, police officers had been assigned a quota to confiscate illegal guns following a series of sniper shootings targeting key figures in Japan.

Police officers instructed an informant to encourage foreigners to bring firearms to Japan as part of efforts to meet the quota. Novosyolov was arrested in the process of exchanging the handgun.

“Me and the organization jumped to grab the opportunity to get the credit,” Inaba said, recalling Novosyolov’s arrest. “I still remember his frightened face at the arrest scene.”

“(My superiors) must have acknowledged that it was an illegal operation. I thought this method was wrong but couldn’t fight back,” Inaba said. “We did many other dirty things and I thought we would have to pay for them someday,” he added.

Inaba said he testified about the police’s sting operation out of his desire to reveal the truth.

Hokkaido police officials declined to comment on the legality of its investigatory method concerning the case. ENDS

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As submitter JDG put it:

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JDG: It’s NOT the fact that this guy was framed in an illegal entrapment by police and wrongly served 2 years.

No, what is BLOWING MY MIND is that the J-cops;1. Set quotas for gun related arrests…in ‘safety Japan’, because they claim…2. There were a series of high profile incidents of sniping at ‘key’ figures! (I never saw ANYTHING about that in the news!). And therefore, to meet the quota…3. J-police instructed informants to tell NJ to bring guns into Japan, so they could be arrested! Because…4. Y’know, ‘quotas’ and stuff…err…

Oh, and yeah, let’s not forget;5. Wrongly imprisoned NJ gets released, BUT why are all these corrupt cops not being prosecuted? Where is the government mandated review of the NPA to stop a BS quota system that engenders abuse?

2) One detail not properly outlined was the timeline. Novosyolov was arrested in 1997 — nearly twenty years ago — and convicted in 1998. He served two years in prison. Yet druggie cop Inaba comes clean in sometime around 2013 and… it takes three more years to spring Novosyolov? Since he was surely not allowed to leave Japan, where was he for the nearly twenty years? Languishing in a Gaijin Tank between the ages of 28 and 47? Bang went the best twenty years of his young life.

Congrats to Novosyolov for getting sprung. But I doubt this will result in any reforms to the system that illegally entraps NJ for sport. Dr. Debito Arudou
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This is just awful and I thank you for covering it. There needs to be serious repercussion and coverage about this sort of crap going on. I honestly fear interaction with the J Police because of behavior and quotas like this.

Thank you Dr. Debito!
These blatantly illegal J-cop activities targeting NJ without repercussions are exactly what every NJ should consider before setting foot in Japan for even a holiday; Japan is Wild West meets Cold War Eastern Europe when it comes to ‘rule of law’ and ‘human rights’.
Shame on all the ‘developed’ nations that have enabled it for the last 70 years.

What allegiance do foriegners owe to a legal system/constitution that does not include them?

America, for example, protects foreigners and citizens alike, as James Madison famously said, “[I]t does not follow, because aliens are not parties to the Constitution … they have no rights to its protection…. [A]s they owe…a temporary obedience [to the Constitution], they are entitled in return to their protection….”

@TJJ, exactly why “doing a flyjin” is perfectly justfied, anytime you like. -“What allegiance do foreigners owe to a legal system/constitution that does not include them? ”
None, whatsoever- that is how Japan wanted it, after all!!

Where was Novosyolov after he served his two years in jail? No mention in the article.

What were “a series of sniper shootings targeting key figures in Japan”? Does this refer to the attempt by Aum Shinrikyo to assassinate National Police Agency chief Takaji Kunimatsu? Were there other assassination attempts?

Bent copper Yoshiaki Inaba did 9 years then wrote a novel which was filmed recently:

There seems to have been minimal coverage, both in the UK and here in Japan ( for obvious reasons ), of this story about the Japanese embassy in London paying a very dubious far-right think-tank, the Henry Jackson Society, to produce anti-Chinese propaganda and insert it into the British media..

One of the founders of the Henry Jackson Society, Matthew Jamison, a Cambridge graduate and a Senior Parliamentary Researcher at the House of Commons, posted this astonishing broadside against the society:

“Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that the Henry Jackson Society, when it was founded, would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist organisation, run in the most dictatorial, corrupt and undemocratic fashion and utilized as a propaganda outfit to smear other cultures, religions and ethnic groups”

“When I first saw Malcolm Rifkind’s article attacking the Chinese regarding the nuclear power deal I had assumed he had been put up to it by the domestic British security service MI5 which is institutionally anti-Chinese and opposed to closer links between Britain and China. The article itself was a load of rubbish and made no sense, as I stated in a previous article. Now it is even more clear with the truth coming out that in fact most of the article was written for Rifkind by the HJS which approached him to put his name to it as part of the anti-Chinese propaganda campaign being paid for by the Japanese Government. I wonder if the article also had input from the Japanese Government?”

“The article appeared in the Telegraph as the work solely of Malcolm Rikfind and made no mention of the fact that the Henry Jackson Society had an overwhelming role in the drafting of the article and that Rifkind was simply the front man for the piece, and did not make clear to its readers that the article was being paid for by the Japanese Government. Did The Telegraph know? Interesting question. How many other articles appear in the British press by authors who in reality are not the actual authors and are products of agreements with foreign governments?”

” For the HJS to get into bed with the nationalist government of Japan is grotesque given the history of the most horrendous brutality the Japanese inflicted upon the British and other peoples during the Second World War, which unlike modern Germany, they have never properly apologized and atoned for with Japanese leaders and high ranking officials still to this day making pilgrimages to “honour” their WWII criminals in the Yasukuni Shrine. Can you imagine if German leaders continued to pay homage to Hitler and Nazi WWII criminals in a “shrine” dedicated to the memory of Third Reich butchers. It is totally disgusting what the Japanese Government have been allowed to get away with continually paying “homage” to and “honouring” the barbarism of Japanese WWII thugs”

Yeah, I noticed that story about HJS and thought straight away that BBC News must be getting a sizeable portion of the ten grand a month because they haven’t once in the last 4 weeks mentioned Abe and the Right wing kindergarten scandal, but are daily slamming Park as corrupt, and running ‘lawless’ China stories.
BBC is giving Japan the ‘fluffy’ stories about tanuki and artists who like polka dots.